Refugee policy and, er, national competence
Paul Foll wrote that his family has volunteered to look after young refugees from Ukraine (Viewpoint, April 21).
He wrote: “If we were full EU members, our refugees would be safe and at home with us. Our anti-refugee policies, while in some cases well intentioned, treat people with cruelty.”
If the UK had stayed in the EU, then Putin might not have been encouraged and the Ukraine invasion might not have happened at all.
Is it Putin’s foreign policy to weaken Europe?
Please be aware that every EU country sets its own rules for migration from the rest of the world.
The Brussels jargon for this is, non-EU migration is a ‘national competence’.
The EU has a supporting role (please see: “Inclusion of non-EU migrants” on europa.eu).
The UK would have kept on-side with its neighbours.
The deal agreed by all 28 national leaders, including David Cameron, would have come in.
Suppose the Ukraine invasion had still happened.
Tony Blair approved the 2001 Temporary Protection Directive.
It set ‘minimum standards for giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons’.
It is about sharing the effort and the consequences.
In March this year, the member countries agreed to activate the Directive for the first time.
If the UK were in the EU and in the Directive, then Paul Foll’s admirable family might have had an easier time.
On the other hand, the UK has been making non-EU migration more difficult since freedom of movement with the Commonwealth was stopped in the 1960s.
Before then, people in Jamaica, for example, were called Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies, or CUKCs.
Theresa May started her Conservative ‘hostile environment’ policies in 2012.
The 2018 Windrush scandal was the result of increasingly harsh policies that led to detained grandmothers and cancer patients denied treatment.
Womad music festival organiser Chris Smith said in 2018 that overseas artists have lost money because of visa delays and refusals after ‘iron-fisted’ and ‘humiliating’ Home Office demands.
In an appalling broken promise, people from the rest of Europe in the UK have been made to apply to the Home Office for the socalled ‘settled status’ or ‘pre-settled status’, despite assurances they would see ‘no change’.
COVID has had an impact, but uniquely for the UK it is COVID combined with the loss of EU.
Perhaps something else might have happened instead, but the last six years have seen time and money wasted on the damaging project of losing EU membership.
The time and money could have been used to make the Home Office better.
PHIL JONES Member, European Movement UK